Tuesday, July 31, 2012

"a hauntological last hurrah"--The Quietusreports on The Ghosts of Bush House, a project in which a fellow who works as a studio manager tat he BBC World Service, which is being decimated by huge cuts, went around its soon-to-be-closed HQ at Bush House on the Strand and recorded nocturnal atmospheres and reverberationa, which he then wove them into a H-ological mood-piece. He also worked in elements taken from "the World Service’s ancient reel-to-reels", an echo perhaps of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. This chap usually goes by the moniker Robin the Fog but the artist name he's going by for this project is The Fog Signals.

"I was working a lot of nightshifts... and as a result would often have the place largely to myself during the
small hours of the morning. On my journeys around Bush House... I used to love
listening to all the sounds around me: the creaks and rumbles of the old
building echoed up and down the stairwells and through the corridors,
even the most mundane of noises suddenly taking on a new significance in
the half-light. Like so many historic buildings around London, Bush House is
constructed of Portland Stone, which is a wonderfully resonant material
to work with... the stone construction of the
walls coupled with the high ceilings gave you this extraordinary reverb.
I would whistle to myself on the landings and then listen as the
whistle fluttered round the space for what seemed like an eternity,
transforming as it did so into something much stranger, as if the
building was adding a few tones of its own. I liked to think these were
the sounds Bush House made when it thought nobody was listening!

"No artificial echo or electronic effects were used in the making of
the album... These are genuinely the sounds of the space."

Ghosts of Bush's chimes with the H-ological preoccupation with the Public Sphere as something that's faded away, something to mourn... but also to celebrate/cherish/protect as per Danny Boyle's Olympics ceremony.

"I’m an ardent believer in the World Service and in public service
broadcasting in general. It’s an incredible ambassador for British
affairs and is renowned for its integrity and trusted the world over."

"The nicest compliments of all have been those who compared it to the
produce of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, an organization which has been a
huge influence on my work and which I always used to fantasize about
joining, despite its closing almost a decade before I joined the BBC."

You can listen to and name-your-price purchase The Ghosts of Bush Househere. "All proceeds will be donated to BBC Media Action (formerly The World
Service Trust), helping in their mission to 'harness the power of media
and communication to help reduce poverty and assist women, children and
men to claim their rights'."

(how i remember the queer feeling that came over me listening to that for the first time, hearing those very precise guitar-texturings and chord sequences modeled exactly on Prefab's Steve McQueen - this sweet sickly poisoned pleasure filled my body)

Sunday, July 22, 2012

"I used to think this obsession was
mine alone. But now nearly everyone I know — and by that I mean everyone who
spends vast, barren tundras of time at her computer — goes to Web sites like
these to escape, destress, perk up, calm down, feel something, not feel
something, distract themselves and (they don’t call it “lifestyle pornography”
for nothing) modulate pleasure and arousal. A friend of a friend calls his
addiction to sites like these “avenues for procrastination,” but I think
there’s something else involved. Like other forms of pastiche — the mix tape,
the playlist, the mash-up — these sites force you to engage and derive meaning
or at least significance or at the very least pleasure from a random grouping
of pictures. Why not dive into an alternative world full of beauty and novelty
and emotion and the hard-to-put-your-finger-on feeling that there’s something
more, somewhere, where you’re not chained to your laptop, half dead from
monotony, frustration and boredom?"

"Perhaps there’s a neurological
component to all this; to the sudden rise of the mood board as mood regulator,
a kind of low-dose visual lithium. And have no fear, the new field of
neuroaesthetics, which investigates the neural basis for aesthetic experience,
is all over it.... what we’re seeking while idly yet
compulsively cruising Pinterest is really just the reliably unpredictable
jumble of emotions that their wistful, quirky juxtapositions evoke...

"There’s a German word for it, of
course: Sehnsucht, which translates as “addictive yearning.” This is, I
think, what these sites evoke: the feeling of being addicted to longing for
something; specifically being addicted to the feeling that something is missing
or incomplete. The point is not the thing that is being longed for, but the
feeling of longing for the thing. And that feeling is necessarily ambivalent,
combining both positive and negative emotions. A paper titled “What Is It We Are Longing For?” ... breaks down these “life longings” into
essential characteristics. They target aspects of our lives that “are
incomplete or imperfect”; involve “overly positive, idealized, utopian
imaginations of these missing aspects”; focus on “incompleteness on the one
hand and fantasies about ideal, alternative realities on the other hand”;
result in a “temporarily complex experience” combining “memories of the past,
reflections on the imperfect present and fantasies about an idealized future”
(this is called “tritime focus”); and that “make individuals reflect on and
evaluate their life, comparing the status quo with ideals or successful
others.

"In other words, your average Pinterest board or inspiration Tumblr basically functions as a longing machine."

Saturday, July 21, 2012

"Fashioned with a veneer of innocence yet painfully burdened with
knowledge... Giving myself up to it, the way I'd surrender to Dionne
Warwick singing Burt Bacharch, is impossible."

That's from a David Toop review of a record by Cornelius (from The Wire, January 2002) that prefigures some of the concerns of Retromania and specifically the chapter on Japanese pop culture and mimesis

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Nothing to do with "retro" at all really, but a deliciously mordant piece at the New Yorker by Jeffrey Toobin, arguing that Mitt Romney has "a record of consistency in his commitment to retroactive retirement"

following
their Monumental Retro-Avant-Garde show at the Tate, Laibach continue
in the retro-repro zone with new compilation-not-compilation Reproduction Prohibited

from the press release

Opening
with their interpretation of Mute’s first release, The Normal’s Warm
Leatherette (here translated as Warme Lederhaut, Laibach premiered the
track at the Short Circuit presents Mute festival, Roundhouse in May 2011), the
tracklisting demonstrates Laibach’s unique take on the cover version.

From
the sublime, Laibach’s interpretation on The Beatles Across The Universe
would melt even the toughest of hearts, to their bombastic cover of Europe’s Final
Countdown, this is a window into Laibach’s own view of pop music, and to
the humour that permeates their work.

Reproduction
Prohibited features two tracks from Volk
(2006), Laibach’s album of reinterpretations of national anthems which uncovers
the violence and the pop intrinsic in the national anthem, surely the ultimate
pop song. Here Germania reinterprets Das Lied der Deutschen,
originally written in 1797 and used after World War I as the national anthem of
the German Empire at the time of the Weimar Republic, while Anglia uses
John Bull’s God Save The Queen as its inspiration.

Mama
Leone, perhaps not familiar to many in
its original version, sold over 20 million copies when it itself was covered by
Bino in the late 70s. B Maschina, written and performed by popular
Slovenian rock group Siddharta, who asked Laibach to remix or
remake their song, was originally released on 2003’s WAT. An additionally
remixed versionis also featured in the
soundtrack to IRON SKY (directed by Timo Vuorensola), a dark science fiction comedy about Nazis invading earth in
2018, after escaping to the Dark Side of the Moon in 1945.

Pop
references itself when Laibach take on Juno Reactor’s God Is God, which
was itself influenced by Laibach’s cover of Austrian group Opus’ Live Is Life,
included here in English ‘symphonic’ version (titled Opus Dei), and in
German version, translated as Leben Heisst Leben. Laibach’s version of God is God was also released
before Juno Reactor’s released their own, so many people still believe that
Laibach’s version is the original one and Juno’s version a cover.

Elsewhere
on the album, Laibach tackle The Beatles and Queen. Taken from Laibach’s album Let
It Be, Across The Universe and Get Back both feature, and
Queen’s hit song One Vision is here translated into a German Geburt Einer
Nation (The Birth of the Nation). The choice of a language, title as
well as the genre of interpretation here all reveal themselves as powerful
instruments!

Bruderschaft, written by Laibach is included here as a double twist
cover. Laibach were invited to cover a Kraftwerk song for a compilation. But
instead doing a straight Kraftwerk cover, the band decided to rearrange
Laibach’s own - original - song from 83’, known as Brat Moj (Brother of Mine)
in German, with the carefully reconstructed Kraftwerkian sounds.

The
CD cover art of the ‘An Introduction To…Laibach’, titled ‘REPRODUCTION
PROHIBITED’ was painted by member(s) of the group in 1981 as the
interpretation of the famous Rene Magritte’s work, ‘Not to be Reproduced’,
from 1937.

The
mirror, a fragile and sometimes distorted reflection of reality, was of great
interest to Magritte, as it is to Laibach. When viewing one of his
images, or when listening to Laibach’s covers, there is a sense that a content,
placed within a frame/the context, might, by a twist of perception, be seen as
a reflection in the mirror, a perception that suddenly turns the space of the
picture/song inside-out.

By
quoting and interpreting this significant work by Magritte, Laibach offer a
clear tool, if not a perfect key, how to solve the riddle of understanding
their method, their philosophy and their humour in cover versions, as we hear
them on this album.

REPRODUCTION
PROHIBITED TRACKLISTING

WARME LEDERHAUT – cover of The
Normal’s Warm Leatherette

BALLAD OF A THIN MAN – cover of Bob
Dylan

GERMANIA – Version of German
national anthem, from the album Volk

ANGLIA – Version of British national
anthem, from the album Volk

MAMA
LEONE – originally recorded by schlager legend Drafi Deutscher, made famous by
Bino

B MASHINA – remixed version featured
on Iron Sky OST, written by Tomi Meglic (Siddharta)

GOD IS GOD – by Juno Reactor,
originally inspired by Life Is Life, from Jesus Christ Superstars

FINAL COUNTDOWN – classic Laibach
cover, originally recorded by Europe

ALLE GEGEN ALLE – originally
recorded by labelmates DAF

ACROSS THE UNIVERSE –
originally recorded by The Beatles

GET BACK – originally recorded by
The Beatles

LEBEN HEISST LEBEN – cover of Opus’
Live Is Life, from Opus Dei

GEBURT EINER NATION – cover of
Queen’s One Vision, from Opus Dei 1987

OPUS
DEI – cover of Opus’ Live is Life

“The
cover version can be seen as a cynical populist tactic by artists lacking in
originality, a gesture of contempt or as a respectful example of good taste and
seriousness. Laibach's open rejection of originality makes the first view
irrelevant and the new originals are too ambivalent to be either entirely
contemptuous or totally respectful. A Laibachised song is sometimes more
kitsch, sometimes more serious and sometimes more emotional than the “old
original” it is based on. Laibachisation re- and de-animates a song, reviving
it for long enough to dispatch it again.”
– Alexei Monroe, author of Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK, from the
Reproduction Prohibited sleevenotes

Friday, July 13, 2012

"In With The Old" -- Phil at, er, The Phil Zone, on the catalogue records outselling current releases phenomenon

Which he argues is really down to the fact that "music is no longer the driver of a
youth culture which in itself no longer seems to have any inherent,
coherent sense of direction", which he further relates to "the process that affects all physical and biological
phenomena on Planet Earth, which is the process of entropification - the natural movement to a state of randomness and disorder."

He wonders if the concept of entropy figures in Retromania, and it does, if somewhat shifted in emphasis, as hyper-stasis. But unlike Phil's great description of cultural entropy as "a voidal stasis in which endless diversity is experienced as
uniform blandness" the difference here is the hyper-ness: the roil of micro-genres that keep emerging but never quite take-off (but equally, never go away completely... instead they rise and dip away and rise again (look at black metal's serial ascents to prominence across 20 years of existence, or the strange trajectory of grime).

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

One of the few 21st Century candidates when it comes to linearity in the old fashioned sense (musical evolution, audience expansion, crossover into unconquered territories) is dubstep. The original fans of course see the path taken by the sound through wobble into brostep as a devolution. But (c.f. rave>jungle and techno>gabba in the 90s, or indeed the history of metal itself), devolution is still a form of linearity.

Bass-tardisation is a direction. In this case (brostep), it is also
-- as a centripetal, scene-forming/genre-conforming drive -- a force
working against entropy. In favour of massification. Just look at the
scale of the raves in America now.

This is a New Thing that is selling (but it's selling tickets, not records).

It also seems to be serving as the locus of generational identity.
Whether any content will emerge beyond "let's go crazy" and "the parents
will find this incomprehensible" is yet to be seen.

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Hey, I predicted that in Retromania!
Or rather, speculated about it as a possible future scenario,
extrapolating from current trends (i.e. where things were at in
2009-2010).

Judging by Kornelis's piece, it's happened much quicker than I imagined:

"The first six months of the year saw sales of 76.6 million catalog
records -- industry-speak for albums released more than 18 months ago --
compared to 73.9 million current albums"

According to Nielsen Soundscan-watcher David Bakula, this has happened because of two factors:
"not having the big blockbuster new releases in the first half, and having very, very strong catalog".
The latter category includes Guns N' Roses' Greatest Hits and four Whitney Houston albums.

Admittedly,
the past has an advantage over the present, because catalogue LP and
greatest hits collections are generally budget-priced, compared with
full-price new releases. In penny-pinching times, that will incline
punters to avoid new albums, or just opt for the track rather than take a
punt on the whole LP (see the 10-fold disparity between the five
million who downloaded "Somebody I Used To Know" versus the half-million
who bought the Gotye album).

It could also be that the kind of people who still bother to buy
music (either as physical CDs or legal downloads) are older, and thus
skew away from buying new releases in favour of old favourites.

1. Radio and other mass outlets are becoming way more conservative and focusing more on the past.
She notes that places like Target give prominent display space to greatest-hits collections, big albums from
established stars, while new releases get "comparatively puny" exposure. And radio, as
explained by Kornelis in a piece for the Seattle Weekly , is becoming "becoming more cautious with their
playlists because of the Personal People Meter, Nielsen's new device for
measuring ratings. Its data shows that people are more likely to switch
channels when unfamiliar songs come on; the incentive to play new songs
is, therefore, diminished from a business-side perspective."

2. The design of digital-music stores encourages people to stick with the familiar.
"What with "personalization," spotlighting of the already-popular in
order to assist people who might be interested in checking out that
Adele lady, and having to cram a lot of information about new releases
into a small space... finding truly new music
is a tough row for people who aren't completely immersed in music.... Incentives like Amazon's
crazy-deep discounting of certain releases only encourage this type of
cocooning".

3. News has more of an effect on album sales than almost any music-centric promotional outlet these days. "Two of the five top catalog albums of 2012's first six months had
Whitney Houston, who died in February, at their core; her greatest-hits
collection sold 818,000 copies, making it the fourth-best-selling album
of the year so far (behind Adele, Lionel Richie, and One Direction), and
the soundtrack to The Bodyguard sold 202,000 copies.... just look at how record sales for Richie's new album Tuskegee,
which is itself a record full of him remaking his old hits with current
country stars, were boosted by a special reminding people of its
existence airing on broadcast TV"

Maura also points out that Adele's 21, which is 2012's best-selling album even though it came out in 2011, has just flipped over into the "catalogue" category (18 months since release, which in its case was Jan 11 last year). That means that as it continues to sell and sell, the catalogue > current effect will only get worse during the second half of 2012.

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

It's inspired by a new play called Maples and Vine that opened in San Francisco in April, whose protagonists have " become allergic to
their fast-paced modern lives". After meeting "a charismatic man" who belongs to "the Society of
Dynamic Obsolescence" they join a "community of 1950’s re-enactors" who live in a "compulsively recreated world" that is "permanently ensconced in the year
1955 – the era of Eisenhower, cars with fins, A-line skirts, mayonnaise
slathered casseroles and Lucky Strike cigarettes". The period details are enforced by an Authenticity Committee.

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Saint Etienne, Sassoon, and the Sixties

"Can you be wildly ahead of your time and hopelessly behind it, too?" asks David Colman in this New York Times Fashion & Style section piece that's sort of about Saint Etienne but mainly about Sarah Cracknell's home in Oxfordshire, which is tricked out with a lot of Sixties artifacts and collectables. Prompting Colman to perorate: "in a world filled with practical, pedestrian stuff, why strive
to live in the present? The past is not only prettier, it’s a lot less
crowded."

Personally I'd have never have fingered Saint Et as that Sixties-fixated (it's just one of many moments in music they've been drawn to and have drawn from). Or even that retro-y (they've generally had their ears trained on what's going on now in pop just as much as they've rifled through the archives).

Cruel paradox: it's the very mod-ness and modernity and modernism of the Sixties that makes it so alluring, so tempting to pastiche. As Cracknell says: “It’s an era with such a great sense of design, with these crazy things
like Vidal Sassoon haircuts and Mary Quant dresses. So stylized, so deliberate. The furniture, too. Or cars!"

That reminded me that when Vidal died recently, I kicked myself for not featuring him in Retromania's chapter on Fashion. He should have been in there right alongside Courreges, Cardin, and Rabanne. As the obituariesandtributes noted, Sassoon was one of the decade's greatest avant-gardists of pop culture and pop couture. The Corbusier of coiffure; his handiwork and scissorwork as startling and angular and neophilia-inciting as the Philips Pavilion. Indeed his geometric five point cut, introduced in 1963 - the year I was born -- was inspired by Bauhaus. Originally he wanted to be an architect, not a hair stylist.

"These [80s hair metal era] were the decadent final days of an arrangement that now seems
nearly as quaint and dusty as the giant front wheel of a penny-farthing
bicycle.... If you understand "rock" in those terms, then "rock" is long dead. Don't
get me wrong: People have made plenty of wonderful rock music since
then. But you'll notice it always has a prefix or an alternate name:
It's indie rock, garage-rock, punk-rock, folk-rock, metal, emo,
power-pop, etc. It comes from people who cheerfully accept the death of Rock-rock,
and are content to occupy artsy anti-commercial niches, to rummage
through the deceased's pocket for useful ideas, to bang together its
bones to make new sounds, to bionically reengineer the body like the Six
Million Dollar Man's, to do whole hilarious Weekend at Bernie's routines
with the corpse, or, in particularly bleak cases, to labor with shock
paddles over the moldering patient, happily admitting that they're
trying to "Bring Rock Back"-- from the dead, one assumes."

Also enjoyed the riffing on the edgeless, degraded version of "camp" that is so ingrained in our culture at this point:

"this is what we do now, we find pop-culture artifacts that Americans
remember fondly, trot them out, pose them in funny positions, surround
them with winking and giggling and mugging for the camera, dip their
pigtails in inkwells, throw things at them, make fun of their hair, and
laugh the way children laugh when they've been told a sex joke they do
not entirely understand. We call this "camp," which makes it sound
sophisticated, but I'm not sure it is anymore: Camp involves a certain
sensitivity, whereas this stuff is mostly self-conscious goofery. And
it's a surprisingly large component of how we look at pop music once we
think we're done with it, as evidenced by the average VH1 countdown show"

what Nitsuh says about the Japandroids record seems to relate to this tenor of triumphant-yet-desperate embattled-egodrama epic-ness that you can hear in a lot of stuff these days, from "We Are Young" to "Uprising"... and that does seem to have evolved through emo and alt-rock to end up at a place close to "Don't Stop Believin'" and "We Are the Champions"

Friday, July 6, 2012

A New (Old?) Brutalism

Love the retro touch of the "embossed label printer" typography on the cover of Perc's A New Brutality

Overlaid on top of that icon of Brutalist Architecture, Trellick Tower.

Do you remember those embossed label printers? I had one. Everyone had one, it seemed like. Then they just disappeared. Bit like slide rules, rendered obsolete by pocket calculators. But I can't recall what it is was that made the embossed label printers obsolete.

And Perc's A New Brutality.... well, judging by the preview below, it sounds a bit like an old brutalism.

(You can hear a longer preview here, along with a bunch of Perc mixes and EPs and what not)

90s hard minimal techno, with touches of industrial and Test Dept in dancefloor mode ("Compulsion"). Stark, ascetic, punitive... Slaphead-severe; proper faceless techno bollocks... at times flashing me back to that 1992-93 London club Knowledge.... a more refined and subdued / slower and less banging take on 80 Aum and Meng Syndicate...

here's a preview selection from last year's similar Wicker & Steel

the embossed label look has a kind of officialdom / bureaucratic, folders/filing cabinets kind of look that reminds me of that whole side of industrial to do with reports, data, documentation, dossiers... records in the archival or governmental sense as opposed to musical

see also this Perc Trax artist

love the title here -- "Greyed Out Life"

And "Mandate" !

Does this relate to the H-ological reinvocation of the Public? institutions and planning bodies and research units dedicated to the welfare of the commonwealth...

Brutalism, as an architectural school, was part of this current... the "we know best" paternalism of urban planning and coordinated development

People have written that I coined this word "retromania", but that's not the case.

I've seen vintage clothes boutiques and retro bric-a-bric shops with the name
Retromania.

There is also a Def Leppard bootleg that came out in 2010 called Retromania, what looks like a collection of rarities and alternate takes, the title obviously a play on Pyromania. (The band also officially released a rarities/B-sides collection in 1993 called Retro Active).

So the word has been floating around for a while. However I did recently discover, when going through some old pieces of mine, that I wrote a piece in the early Nineties whose working title was "Retromania" (it ended up being printed, by the Guardian, under another headline). But even then I think I was just picking up on a word that was in the air. As coinages go, it's a pretty obvious, occurs-to-many-people-independently type word.

Joe Elliott explained that the dispute is over proper compensation for digital rights (which has resulted in a deadlock where none of Leppard's studio albums are currently
available as downloads)

"When
you're at loggerheads with an ex-record label who...is not prepared
to pay you a fair amount of money and we have the right to say,
'Well, you're not doing it,' that's the way it's going to be. Our contract is such that they can't
do anything with our music without our permission, not a thing. So
we just sent them a letter saying, 'No matter what you want, you are
going to get "no" as an answer, so don't ask.' That's the way we've
left it. We'll just replace our back catalog with brand new, exact
same versions of what we did."

Shades of Borges!

And it's challenging too:

"You just
don't go in and say, 'Hey guys, let's record it,' and it's done in
three minutes. We had to study those songs, I mean
down to the umpteenth degree of detail, and make complete forgeries
of them. Time-wise it probably took as long to do as the originals,
but because of the technology it actually got done quicker as we got
going. But trying to find all those sounds...like where am I gonna
find a 22-year-old voice? I had to sing myself into a certain
throat shape to be able to sing that way again. It was really hard
work, but it was challenging, and we did have a good laugh over it
here and there."